Survey: Data Theft is Wall Street Drones' Unemployment Insurance

Knowledge is power! A recent Cyber Ark Software survey reveals a boom in data theft among workers on Wall Street and at Canary Wharf in London. A quarter of respondents professed a willingness to take data from their employers, though 85 percent of them know it's illegal. The survey suggests that the money boys and girls aren't shopping their ill-gotten, sensitive company information on the open market, necessarily -- they're holding it in case they get fired and need something on which to get by (though "41 percent of respondents have already taken sensitive data with them to a new position").

The survey also shows, understandably, drop from 52 to 40 percent of these workers worried about finding another job in the recession over the past year...

This dovetails nicely with a MarketWatch review of The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, the Jack Bogle book about the "'Happy Conspiracy" of Wall Street plus co-conspirators in Washington and Corporate America" to keep Goldman Sachs rich. The review by Paul B. Farrell, called "15 Signs Wall Street Pathology is Spreading," suggests that contrary to the conventional wisdom of Noble Business vs. Corrupt Big Gummint, key amoral attitudes now common in high finance -- such as "Paranoid obsessives about secrecy, guilt and non-disclosure," "Borderline personalities who regularly ignore conflicts of interest," and "When bankruptcy threatens, bribe friends in 'Happy Conspiracy'" -- have spread to Washington. "Sadly for America," says Farrell, "Goldman's disease is rapidly becoming a pandemic spreading beyond Wall Street's too-greedy-to-fail banks, infecting our economy, markets and government as it metastasizes globally."

It seems we missed an opportunity when we paid off banks instead of publicly hanging a few of their presidents. The moral delinquency of the small fry on Wall Street may be attributable to our permissiveness.